Writers' Festival shows readers care

The English novelist Louis de Bernieres saw a sign for "Taxi's" outside the Sydney Writers' Festival and noted with perverse pleasure, "I see you have the grocer's apostrophe, too."

Inside, discussing the difficulty of writing erotica, he remembered his favourite sentence in a Mills and Boon novel: "He plunged his proud manhood into her rich generosity."

Diseased English is everywhere. Sales of books about language, such as Death Sentence by Don Watson and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, prove that readers care.

The festival ended at Walsh Bay yesterday with the launch of the Plain English Foundation to revolutionise the way public language is used in this country.

The foundation's executive director, Neil James, said diseased English was most insidious when politicians wanted to hide something. The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was the worst recent offender.

Instead of killing anyone in Iraq, American troops "degraded by 70 per cent a body of soldiers, "attrited" or "deconflicted" them.

The playwright Alex Buzo quoted bureaucratese calling roadkill "vehicle-induced wildlife fatalities". Amanda Lohry, a novelist and essayist, said that by forbidding students to use the word "I" in essays, schools encouraged pseudo-objective expressions such as "Thus it can be seen that . . .".

The Plain English Foundation works with organisations to simplify documents, arguing that unclear communication dilutes democracy and costs business up to $2 billion a year.

The festival, which attracted a record 45,000 book-lovers - an increase of 22 per cent on last year - mixed politics and comedy in a program of 250 writers at 175 events that stretched to Parramatta, Wollongong and the Blue Mountains.

Sellout crowds at the new 850-seat Sydney Theatre saw Harvey Pekar and Michael Leunig, Alain de Botton and David Sedaris. The Watergate whistleblower John Dean packed 1500 into the Sydney Town Hall.